Cousins – Counting the Gs

Many people are confused about how to name the relationship between two individuals. We hear terms like 3^rd cousin, twice removed – but what does that mean and how do we determine it. I wrote an earlier version of this with examples from my own family tree (http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/05/genealogy-story-counting-gs.html), but I’d like to make it even simpler. Note that in the below the sentences in italics are an example and are not part of the simple steps. The four steps in bold are all that you need in most cases.

Step 1 – find the common ancestor

This is just what it sounds like. Find the individual in the family tree who is the common ancestor to the two people involved.

As an example, let’s call the two people Bob and Sally and their common ancestor’s name is Alexander.

Step 2 – count the Gs in each relationship to the common ancestor

For each person, determine the relationship between them and the common ancestor. Count the number of “G”s in each of these relationships.

Again, for example, let’s say that Alexander is Bob’s great-great-grandfather (or great*2 grandfather for short), and that Alexander is Sally’s great-great-great-great-grandfather (or great*4 grandfather for short). Thus, our two numbers are 3 and 5 respectively, one for each “great” and one for the “grand”.

Step 3 – determine the difference, this is the “removed” part

In our example, the difference between 3 and 5 is 2, so that means that we will have a “twice removed” in our answer.

Step 4 – what’s the smaller number, this is our degree of cousin-ness

In our example, 3 is the smaller number. So, in our example, Bob and Sally are 3^rd cousins, twice removed.

In most cases, that’s it, you’re done. However, if one/both of the relationship numbers from step 2 was zero, then we have more work to do.

Special Cases – what to do if either/both of the numbers is zero

One of the beauties in English is that the word “cousin” is both gender-neutral and reflexive, i.e. if you are my cousin, then I am also your cousin. But when we have a zero in the above steps, the term “zero-eth cousin” is not a meaningful term. So we’ll need to introduce other words to describe the relationship.

Case A – BOTH relationship numbers are zero

Let’s first consider the case where both of the relationships to the common ancestor result in a zero. For example, Alexander is the father of Bob and the father of Sally. One could say that Bob is Sally’s brother and Sally is Bob’s sister. But the words brother/sister are neither gender-neutral nor reflexive.

Fortunately, we do have an appropriate gender-neutral, reflexive term to use in this case. The word is “sibling”. So, Bob and Sally would be siblings in this case. (Also note that I’m not going to discuss here things like half-siblings, or step-siblings.)

Case B – One of the numbers is zero, the other is one

Let’s say that Alexander is Bob’s father, but Alexander is Sally’s grandfather. So our relationship numbers are zero and 1. We could be tempted to say that they are siblings once removed. That would be technically correct, but it’s not typically how we would describe this relationship between them. Rather, we would say that Bob is Sally’s uncle and Sally is Bob’s niece. But the problem is that the words uncle/aunt and niece/nephew are neither gender-neutral nor reflexive. And there is no word that I am aware of in the English language that can be used in place of these words. So we’re left with these messy words to use. But since most people are used to using them, that’s fine.

Case C – One of the numbers is zero, the other is larger than one

Here we need to add back in the great/grand “G-words” that we used back in step 2. But since we’ve already accounted for one of the “G”s in the terms uncle/aunt/niece/nephew, we add back in one less G-word than the larger of the two numbers.

Thus, if Alexander is Bob’s great-great-grandfather and Alexander is Sally’s father (e.g. their relationship numbers are 3 and zero respectively), this makes Sally Bob’s great aunt and Bob Sally’s great nephew. If the difference is even larger, say 6 and zero, then use great*5 aunt/uncle and great*5 nephew/niece.

(I’m not going to get involved in whether the proper term is “great nephew” or “grandnephew”, if you want to see more, look at this reference – https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2015/02/25/great-versus-grand/).